Wrong colors of Cosmos Assetts

[Micha]

Hello,

again and again I have the problem that 3D people from Cosmos look as if the gamma value is not correct. They are too dark, the colors are too saturated. The dark areas had hardly any detail. To me it looks like an error in the production pipeline of the models and textures.

Here are a few people next to each other. The two people sitting in the middle are far too dark and colorful. Not even their teeth are white. Likewise the man on the far right. Everyone else looks reasonably natural.



Here is an example from a project - I had to lighten the seated woman in the postwork.


An other example:



The best thing would be for someone to take the time to fix all the people and Cosmos objects. But will anyone do the work?

Another solution would be a basic color control for Cosmos object with gamma, color gain and offset ( or plus saturation, color shift). We would have an added value with the option that users could adjust the colors to scenes. For example, a red ball could become a green ball.

Without basic corrections the quality of the assets is not good enough for my clients and it means a lot of postwork to adjust the colors. It is frustrating to see the beautiful models but when they are inserted into the scene and rendered, they stand out because of their unnatural look and cannot be direct used.

[DCHA34]

I couldn't agree with you more.
I think there's the same problem with Cosmos plants and trees. It's all too dark. I've already posted about this problem.
Generally speaking, I don't use Cosmos items any more, apart from vehicles.

[fixeighted]

To be honest, none of them are that great, so need adjustments and extra steps to make them look half reasonable, in my opinion.
It is what you get as basically 'free samples', as they have no reflection/glossy maps, no displacement maps etc., which afaik are all included in the paid versions, some of which I have.
The rest of the content is....mixed.

[viktoria.dimitrova]

Hello everyone,

Micha Thank you for bringing this up.

Although we are trying to ensure consistency across our assets, slight variations in color between vendors is to be expected. In the early Cosmos days, when there weren't as many assets, having the original textures provided by vendors wasn't such an issue. But as the amount of Cosmos content increases, we will need to give the asset's color management more consideration. However, you should note that not all vendors agree to make changes to their assets in Cosmos.

In the future, we plan to update and improve older assets, and we also aim to improve their color ranges. We want to make things easier for our users, as we will keep adding new content to Cosmos.

When you say "basic color control for Cosmos objects" do you mean having these opinions available along with each Cosmos asset's parameters? If you need to adjust the colors of the assets, you can also use the Color Correction node, but you will need to do this for each asset individually.

DCHA34 we have your report, and when updating assets in the future, vegetation and people will have a higher priority.

fixeighted, in terms of material complexity, some vendors provide assets of people with more advanced shading, which includes reflection, roughness/glossiness, bump maps, and etc.

[fixeighted]

fixeighted, in terms of material complexity, some vendors provide assets of people with more advanced shading, which includes reflection, roughness/glossiness, bump maps, and etc. [/QUOTE]

What I was saying is that those that are offered within Cosmos are 'cut-down', or 'stripped' versions of those, without all the associated maps, where they may exist within the payed-for versions
Please correct me if I am mistaken.

[viktoria.dimitrova]

Hi fixeighted,

People from Cosmos and those downloaded from the vendor's page should have the same texture maps, but some differences are possible. Could you give us an example of a asset so we could further check it?

Thanks!

[fixeighted]

Yes I was just checking this.

Renderpeople ones are fine, as are the 3D People ones and the AXYZ from what I've sampled.

Those from Human Alloy (what looks to be the majority in Cosmos) are missing all but the diffuse, as far as I can tell.
They no longer have a website (their Cosmos website link goes nowhere) and exist only on CGTrader, so it's not possible to confirm whether they differ from the paid versions.
All the Cosmos ones are from their high/low poly collections from around 10 years ago and state they only have 2k diffuse.
They do have some that they sell which contained normal, reflection etc., but those are only the rigged versions. I have a couple that I checked.

There are anomalies such as the attached from Enscape, where there is a normal map for her glasses....and that is all, which is just weird/pointless.
After checking other randoms, I'll guess all the Enscape models are missing all but diffuse apart from something like the above example.

Generally, it'd be useful to know before downloading which have the necessary maps and are therefore the highest quality available.
The reason is that e.g. my client chooses a character they want to see, only for me to then tell them they can't have that one because the quality is awful
Naturally I get that not everyone wants/needs high quality but it's always good to have an idea of what you're downloading before filling up drives with stuff.

[Micha]

My problem are not only small variations in the colors, it looks to me as if a totally wrong color correction was used. A bug in the production workflow from the 3D scan to the Cosmos asset.

Here is my example again. Let's take the two seated men. The one on the left looks good - bright, friendly, natural colors. The one on the right in the green jacket is totally wrong like from a wrong color space.

Original Cosmos - strong breaks in the colors


For a test I changed the texture from sRGB to custom gamma=1 and he looks much better. Aha, he's more of a pale, blond guy - who would have thought? Only the black point isn't right, everything looks a bit too bright, but much better than before.
(Gamma=1 for person 3,4 and 6)



And with a bit of postwork we can finally see what corresponds to our daily experience.



I also made the corrections for a few of the other figures. This is the quality that my customers expect from me and that they are used to from V-Ray. AIso I can't imagine that the vendor of the man in the green suit wouldn't prefer to see a model like this in the Cosmos library.

When you say "basic color control for Cosmos objects" do you mean having these opinions available along with each Cosmos asset's parameters? If you need to adjust the colors of the assets, you can also use the Color Correction node, but you will need to do this for each asset individually.

I use V-Ray for Rhino and there is nothing I can do about the colors. I see no way to add a Color Correction node.



But I saw today that I can access the materials with the strangely named "merge" button. Unfortunately, this fills the asset editor with additional materials, which is not nice for architectural scenes with lots of materials. It would be better if the materials remained in the structure of the geometry.




I wish I could get access to basic parameters like gamma, black and white point within the geometry section to fix weak textures. Saturation and color adjustments would be nice too.

[Micha]

It also seems to play into the fact that the textures were created on a computer with gamma correction 1.8, because the texture here still looks best when corrected with this. I suspect the vendor used a Mac computer and not sRGB mode.

Can we agree on a bug in the color correction workflow?

[viktoria.dimitrova]

Hi all,

fixeighted, indeed, the Human Alloy assets in Cosmos are their ‘Basics’ 3D people.

While it may seem unusual, the inclusion of a normal map for additional props in the Enscape model is likely a deliberate decision in their creation process. In some cases, models utilize baked normal information for specific parts, such as glasses, while relying on mesh normals for the rest of the model. Both approaches are valid, depending on the intended visual quality and performance requirements.

Thanks for your last suggestion, we will consider adding additional information about the texture types in the future.

Micha we appreciate you investigating the gamma values and bringing your concerns to our attention regarding the differences in assets from different vendors. Your in depth research is a great leading point and we will take it into consideration when updating the people.

While we cannot standardize every external workflow, we are dedicated to optimizing our own processes to ensure consistent and reliable model delivery. To improve our content, we are continually analyzing our procedures and considering changes that are in line with industry-leading standards.

Lastly, it's possible to add a Color Correction node in V-Ray for Rhino by using the Wrap In option, available in the texture slot's context menu. It places the existing texture within a new one and then plugs the new one in the original slot.